Four interrelated research programs are proposed on social judgments (attitudes, thoughts, cognitions), defined as the person's placement of a topic of thought (e.g., the self, losing one's job, an AIDS vaccine) on a dimension of variability (e.g., likelihood, desirability). Research Program A studies the operation of such judgments in systems consisting of a core topic (e.g., developing an AIDS vaccine) plus thoughts sa1iently related to it (e.g., topics commonly evoked when prestudy Ss free associate on this core topic). We study thought systems' operations by two methods: (1) by directly inducing change on a judgment of the core topic and then measuring impacts on judgments of remote topics in the system; and (2) by manipulating the salience of remote topics by a biased-scanning task (e.g., "List antecedents that would speed up discovery of an AIDS vaccine"), then measuring the effect on the core- topic judgment. We test theorized principles of thought systems' operations, including realistic principles (e. g., sufficient reason, utility maximization), autistic gratification principles (e.g., rationalization, wishful thinking), and lazy cognition principles (e.g., loose linkage, temporal inertia). Research Program B, a spin-off from A, focuses on such system's positive- negative asymmetries, both in the cognitive sense (thinking about aspects a stimulus has vs. lacks) and in the affective sense (thinking about desirable vs. undesirable aspects of a stimulus). Positive vs. negative thinking about stimuli are not simply opposite (relative to neutral thinking) but asymmetrically opposite in effects on the quantity and content of evoked thoughts and on judgments of the evoking stimulus. Implications of four explanatory theories (distinctiveness, two-step, markedness, and communication-game) are tested. Research Program C studies how social judgments are affected by diverse rhetorical tropes (beyond metaphors) used in persuasive messages. We have organized hundreds of rhetorical tropes into a psychologically meaningful system to allow testing the main, mediational, and interactional predictions of four alternative theories (attention, source, meaning, and mood theories) of how diverse tropes affect attitude change. Research Program D uses the trigonometric model of visual acuity as an analog to make nonobvious predictions about how distortions in social judgments result from the observer's interest level on the dimension being judged and from the observer's and the social stimuli's positions on the dimension.